By Katherine Blunt

By some measures, Michele Spagnuolo had it all.

He earned perfect grades in master's programs for engineering and computer science. Google hired him as an information security engineer and promoted him to roles with greater responsibility and compensation. He received awards and acknowledgments for his security work and served as an expert witness in legal cases.

He may have thrown it all away.

Spagnuolo, 36, now faces fraud and money-laundering charges. Prosecutors alleged he earned $1.2 million by illegally trading contracts on Polymarket involving bets on the most-searched people of 2025.

A criminal complaint filed by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office alleges that Spagnuolo last year made bets based on nonpublic search data, access to which Google restricts to "only a limited number of employees." The data revealed the most searched people at that time to be musicians Kendrick Lamar and d4vd, who both finished in the top five, court records said.

Absent from the indictment, unsealed Wednesday, was any indication of why someone with a coveted role at one of the world's most prestigious and successful companies, and a professional profile that has won him accolades and speaking invitations, would risk everything for a sum that is relatively modest by the standards of tech company compensation.

Google placed Spagnuolo on leave and said it is cooperating in the investigation. Spagnuolo didn't respond to several messages seeking comment.

Google employees' compensation packages typically include a significant component of stock grants, the value of which can dwarf the salary component over time. When Spagnuolo -- an Italian citizen who lives in Zurich and goes by Miki -- was hired in 2014, shares in Google parent Alphabet were trading at less than $30. Today, their value has topped $380.

Matt Schulman, chief executive and founder of Pave, an AI platform for compensation data, said that a Google information security engineer at Spagnuolo's level likely earns hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, if not more, in base pay and equity. At large public tech companies, the upper end of the salary range for employees in such roles is about $1.24 million a year, much of which is equity.

"That makes the stakes of anything that could jeopardize their employment extremely high," he said.

Spagnuolo, on his website and blog, spells out his accomplishments and interests in detail. He created a timeline of his education, career milestones, research and presentations and wrote at length about times when he felt valued for his intellect and problem-solving abilities.

Google recruiters began courting him in 2011, he wrote. At that time, he was headed to Chicago for a graduate degree in computer science at the University of Illinois. For his thesis, he created a forensics tool to help determine the identities of users associated with bitcoin transactions.

His first interview with Google was in 2013, while he was at Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy, studying for a graduate degree in computer engineering. A Google security engineer in Zurich called him.

"The interview was completely technical and straight to the point," Spagnuolo wrote. "He asked me several technical questions about security from the beginning, and I really appreciated that."

With 10 minutes left, he was asked to write code, implementing a popular security tool from scratch. Spagnuolo wrote that the interviewer seemed to care more about his thought process than his code, which he said was "a very good thing."

As the hiring process progressed, he also interviewed for a cybersecurity job with Facebook, but he wrote that he was disappointed by that process because he felt the interviewer cared more about the code than his process.

Google hired Spagnuolo in 2014, and he quickly became known in web-security circles for an exploitation technique he discovered in a white-hat (aka "good hacker") effort to find system vulnerabilities. He presented his findings at security conferences in Malaysia, Vietnam and Amsterdam.

Prosecutors allege that from October to December of last year, Spagnuolo wagered approximately $2.7 million on 25 bets tied to the Google Year in Search results.

When cashing in his winnings from the Google bets in December, Spagnuolo used several steps to obfuscate the digital money trail, including the use of a crypto-transfer service with special privacy protection, according to the DOJ's criminal complaint.

But the FBI identified Spagnuolo because of an earlier withdrawal, in which he hadn't protected his identity.

In November, he moved nearly $150,000 off Polymarket onto a crypto "swapping service," the complaint said. Soon afterward, an identical quantity of funds left the service for a payment processor, where they were received in an account in Spagnuolo's name. His Italian government ID had been used to open that account.

Write to Katherine Blunt at katherine.blunt@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 29, 2026 21:31 ET (01:31 GMT)

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